


It's Alright, I'm Only Bleeding

by twelveshots



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 07:22:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/881018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twelveshots/pseuds/twelveshots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of '65, two men are reunited. They coexist together, but remain separated by the shadow of a legend that neither truly knows how to approach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Alright, I'm Only Bleeding

_She clung to the walls around them like a ghost, never spoken on their tongues and barely murmured past their lips._

\---

“Tell me… what was she _really_ like?”

The question filtered through the room, prompting Snake to stop reading the paper in his hands, but not yet forcing his eye away from the ink.

“… what?” he grunted in response, flipping the thin page as he feigned some level of disinterest.

“The Boss,” Adamska clarified unnecessarily, shifting in his space on the bed next to John. His eyes were fixed on the older man, effortlessly slipping past his façade and cutting right to his core. Something Snake had grown accustomed to, but he still chose to play ignorant when the situation called for it. He grunted again as he held the paper in place, scrolling past the same sentence over and over without the slightest idea as to what it really said.

\---

It had been three months like this. Ocelot made his way to America, intentions as ambiguous as they always were and a single satchel bag hooked over a thin shoulder. His entire life was seamlessly uprooted from behind the Iron Curtain and placed point blank in the middle of Snake’s – just _how_ exactly was still a blur to him. But he accommodated it… even smiled in anticipation as he waited for the blond to arrive. When that day finally came, that same smile rode with him in the cabin of his old Ford F-1 to the airport, widening slightly as the young man appeared amidst the crowd. Adamska’s hair was slightly longer, less regimented, and he filled out his civilian clothes with a distinct youth that John sometimes forgot he had. The year was only 1965, but it seemed as though time was moving at different speeds for the two of them. John had aged. Fine lines formed around the corners of his eye and brow, which Adam would soon learn to love tracing with his index finger while John faked a deep sleep. Neither man would call the other on it… there was never any point.

Both of them found out the truth about The Boss in their own ways. Snake felt a familiarity around Ocelot from the very beginning… studying the contours of his jaw and cheeks and that distinct spark behind cool, blue eyes. It was part of the pull that made his expression lighten in Rassvet, choosing to spare the young man’s life despite what he knew his training dictated he do. But when he truly learned about Ocelot’s lineage from Zero, he felt the world nearly break away from under him. A part of The Boss still lived on, outside of the confines of his own chest and the hushed, empty conversations with the other members of FOX. When the call came from Adam one day telling him he was coming to America, Snake had no choice but to murmur an affirmative, offering his home to him without the chance to hesitate or think better of the idea. 

Adamska found out soon after Snake left the USSR, disappearing on the horizon with a person that was always meant to be him. In reviewing Volgin’s files and data on the Legacy, it all became resoundingly clear. Part of him already knew; a pang of intuition that Ocelot so precisely sharpened for his line of work. But ultimately, it didn’t really matter. The Boss was little more than another face to him, but at the same time the missing piece to a vague secrecy that always hung around his neck when it came to his preferential treatment.

Still, it had the incessant need to come to the front of his mind whenever he spent too long thinking about it all. 1964… Snake… _John_. The man whose every word he begrudgingly clung to, despite how hard he tried to cover it up. Sometimes he didn’t even bother. Infatuation took hold, strong and unrelenting, and nothing seemed quite the same anymore. When Snake left with EVA, Ocelot was left behind with only that field of white and red and the unresolved tension that churned in the pit of his gut.

The Boss was just another thread that tied the two of them together. The son she lost, and the son he became. When he arrived in America, Adam saw the toll her death had taken on him, and suddenly the eyepatch he wore covered the least of what he lost. It manifested in his demeanor; slivers of grief shining through the cracks that fading smiles left in their wake. He too wore his hair longer, shifting uncomfortably back into civilian life while Adam strove to thrive in it, knowing full well just how short-lived it would likely be. Snake’s beard was fuller and that single eye could only brighten so much - glowing embers where a fire used to burn. It was a reaction that Ocelot was denied through circumstance, but the younger man barely gave it any thought.

“Big Boss, huh?” Adamska teased him one afternoon during his first week of staying there.

“… yeah. It’s not something I chose,” Snake replied, busying himself with putting away groceries that mostly Ocelot selected.

“So you’re taking her place?” he asked in English, accent still tainting some of his words. 

“It’s not that,” Snake murmured; back facing Ocelot as he aimlessly sorted through his fridge. It was the first time they had truly broached the subject of The Boss since their reunion, but both men had been sidestepping silently around it for days. Snake felt her there, always standing in the room right along with them. He saw her face in his; hauntingly alive and staring right back when their gaze happened to meet. John tried not to look too closely whenever Adam approached him… the few times he insisted they spar and another when Ocelot took his mouth with his own after a night of drinking, too eager in jumping on an opportunity like he so often did. Snake didn’t resist, but was slower in reciprocating; gradually matching the younger man’s resolve as he closed his good eye and let his hands take control. Ocelot gladly gave it away as Snake pinned him against the nearest wall, resigned for once in not putting up much of a fight.

“Then you still prefer ‘Snake’?” Ocelot asked, snapping the older man’s thoughts right back out of his haze.

“… I think I’m starting to prefer John more than either,” he answered flatly as he closed the refrigerator and walked out of the room in search of his cigars. Adam smirked, fondly recalling just how easily he had given that name away to him one year earlier. He slid off of his perch on a tall barstool and followed him out of the room, trailing his footsteps like a cat stalking his prey, satisfied with leaving the subject alone in favor of the rest of their night.

\---

Slender legs shifted under the covers as Adam watched John stare blankly at his newspaper. Never reading… always lost somewhere in those same, persistent thoughts. Ocelot allowed him the false sense of security and never pointed it out, just like Snake allowed him to watch as he did it, caught in the slightest shred of peripheral vision he still had left. 

These were the unspoken moments that made Adamska wonder about her. _He_ was thinking about her, which made his own mind stray. John took the place of what he couldn’t be, and the faintest tinge of jealousy settled in the back of his throat. But it was nothing like the resentment he felt towards EVA as he watched her slip into the warehouse in Rassvet before he could, taking his place and stealing it all away from him, at least temporarily. It was more a curiosity of what could have been, and what would now always be an unspoken and barely scratched space between the two men lying side by side in bed together. Adam could only wonder what it must have been like to really know her, and in turn, what it was like for her to really know Snake. He never doubted that he’d get there in his own way, but also had enough insight to know just how long that road would truly take to traverse.

“It doesn’t really matter, anyway,” he murmured, just as content with inching closer, closing the distance between them and sliding one wiry arm around the man still staring silently ahead.


End file.
